It is often desirable, and sometimes necessary, to know the location or position of a wireless device in a network. For example, a wireless device may place an emergency call in response to an emergency event. It may be desirable to provide the emergency center with an accurate location of the mobile station. In another example, a user may utilize a wireless device to browse through a website and may click on location sensitive content. A web server may then query a home network or a serving network for the position of the wireless device. The network may initiate position processing with the wireless device in order to ascertain the position of the wireless device. The network may then return a position estimate for the wireless device to the web server, which may use this position estimate to provide appropriate content to the user.
Position determination processes, also referred to as location services, may be used to estimate or otherwise determine a location of a device associated with a wireless communication network and/or may make use of a determined location for a mobile device to provide additional services to the user of the mobile device or to an external user or client such as support of direction finding, navigation, locating a friend, colleague or relative or maintaining a location history for a user, an entity or some valuable asset.
In a particular example, a position determination process may be implemented to estimate location coordinates for a mobile device such as a cellular telephone or other like mobile terminal. There are a variety of techniques available to support position determination processes. For example, a Satellite Positioning System (SPS) such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) and/or other like systems may be used to estimate the location of a mobile terminal.
In supporting a position determination process, a location server which may be part of, or accessible from, a wireless network may interact with a mobile device using a positioning protocol such as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) Positioning Protocol (LPP) defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) or the LPP Extensions (LPPe) protocol defined by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). The positioning protocol may enable one or more positioning methods to be used by the location server and/or by the mobile device to assist or enable location determination of the mobile device. Examples of positioning methods include Assisted GPS (A-GPS), Assisted Global Navigation Satellite System (A-GNSS), Observed Time Difference Of Arrival (OTDOA), Enhanced Cell ID (ECID) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) positioning, to name a few well known examples. When a positioning protocol supports at least several (e.g. three or more) different position methods, as is the case for LPP, or many (e.g. more than a dozen) positioning methods, as is the case for LPPe, the support of the positioning protocol may be complex in a location server and/or in a mobile device, resulting in use of more resources (e.g. memory and processing), more implementation and more testing than in the case of a positioning protocol that is dedicated to supporting only one or two positioning methods. Means to simplify the more complex positioning protocols (e.g. LPP and LPPe) in order to reduce resource usage, implementation and/or testing and to use the resulting positioning protocols to assist or enable location of a mobile device may be of benefit.